Photoshop CS4 without all the rest in odds and ends
Sunday 3rd of January 2010, 10:28:45 am
I had to redo my computer setup, as I literally fried my system disk (ever seen an HD short circuit? There's a lot of smoke...) and that meant reinstalling Photoshop CS4. This time round I wanted to make sure I only installed what I needed, without all the crap Adobe's installer forces on you, so in the hopes that Adobe doesn't delete the post, instructions on how are here.
If they do, a verbatim copy:
All the dependencies that are not marked as "critical" in the proxy payload XML files for Bridge3All, CSIAll, Photoshop11-Core and Photoshop11-Core x64 need to be commented off, prior to running the installer. This will give you the ability to uncheck everything (except for Drive x64, which can be turned off by turning off the 32 bit version of Drive, so no loss there).
In order to just get Photoshop installed without all the unwanted/unnecessary components, the only things that need to be checked are:
- CMaps (required for proper typesetting for fonts with CID maps, which you care about even if you don't know what that means)
- All Color specifications
- Photoshop (obviously)
- Type Support (lets you type text in photoshop. rather essential)
- XMP Panels (required for the user inferface)
Optional, but recommended:
- Fonts (quite a number of good fonts, no reason not to install these)
- Photoshop Support
- Search for Help
- Commoncolor components (if you care about synchronised/calibrated color work)
- Update Manager (updates are good)
Do you use dokuwiki? in odds and ends
Thursday 20th of August 2009, 02:46:27 am
If you do, then perhaps this plugin that I wrote will be of use to you; it lets you use standard tab delimited tables in your wiki, turning it into proper tables when you view the page in a browser.
This allows you to keep your data as pure as possible (ie, not having to stick in annoying wiki tabling formatting) for processing by other programs or utilities.
Enjoy.
Playing games in windowed mode in odds and ends
Saturday 6th of June 2009, 08:39:26 am
First off, if you play Maple Story, go away.
If that statement didn't make sense to you, allow me to explain. "Maple Story" is an online multiplayer RPG gamy that doesn't let users play it windowed, because that lets you run bots (gasp! imagine!). A bit like WoW, really. Of course, that's also incredibly inconvenient in an age of instant messengers, and so every single Maple Story player has been begging for a way to play it windowed.
Which has made them clutter up the internet something awful. Their millions of posts on forums about getting their game to run in a window makes trying to find a proper solution to running games (or more precise, applications) that use DirectX in windowed mode a ridiculous pain.
Now, I've suffered for you, so you don't have to. Before we continue: the "-win", "-window", "-windowed" etc. command line flags rarely ever work because they're not a universal. Programmers have to explicitly add argument interpretation to their executable, and most will go "fuck that, that's what the in-app configuration is for". So tough luck, don't you dare spout that nonsense on the internet as a viable solution.
With that covered, in the hopes that you don't have to go through the same pain I did, here's the list of programs you will want to have run across (but most likely won't have, because searching for them takes forever):
This is an old (2006), discontinued, DirectX hook utility that lets you play, yes, Maple Story in windowed mode. Also, Starcraft. However, that's pretty much where its compatibility ends. Want something more powerful? You then probably want...
3D-Analyze (click on files, then click the 3D-Analyze picture)
This is an even older (2004), and discontinued, DirectX hook utility that lets you force a hell of a lot of DirectX properties, as well as faking different graphics devices, to see how well the application copes. One of the options is a "force windowed" mode, but like DxWnd, this doesn't work with all applications. If it doesn't, you'll probably want to try...
D3DWindower (real version at geocities but it's a Japanese page, which I doubt you'll be able to read)
This is a slightly more up to date utility (2007) which will hook into DirectX and tries to make it behave, window wise. Generally, this is a good utility, but if it doesn't work, don't despair just yet, because there's always the ultimate solution...
Why is this the ultimate solution? Because this is a DirectX debugging utility. It may be older than DirectX 10, but it was designed to hook into DirectX so hardcore that it would allow DirectX programmers to debug full-screen applications by forcing their fullscreen resolution to something smaller than full screen.
Because of this. it seems to work for most applications that DxWnd, 3D-Analyze and D3DWindower do not work for. Unsurprisingly, this utility too is discontinued, although development stopped in may 2008, so it's only been discontinued relatively recently. Despite of this, if your game is preDX10, good chance this hook will do magical things to otherwise ridiculously stubborn games (I'm looking at you, Lego Star Wars II)
So there you go, four utilities that you can try to get your games to bloody run the way you want them to, rather than the way the game companies want you to. And not a moment too soon, here I was fearing I had to learn Windows and DirectX programming so I could write a stupid fullscreen-disabling-hook myself.
If you're a windows programmer with DirectX knowledge, do the rest of the world a favour... update D3DLookingGlass (it's open source!) for us so it also works with DX10.
Cheers!
- Pomax
A better layout manager in BetterFlowLayout
Thursday 14th of May 2009, 06:00:34 am
Layout management in Java gives me lots of headaches. Especially since I'm writing a custom text annotation tool and there do not seem to be any layout managers that are designed to do what you expect for text-like objects: format as lines and paragraphs.
So I ended up writing my own layout manager, called BetterFlowLayout, which does *almost* the same thing as the normal FlowLayout layout manager but with a crucial difference: you can actually force newlines and line skips. WOW POMS, SO REVOLUTIONARY! I know, there's a few million people on the internet who post on forums asking how to make FlowLayout do linebreaks only to hear people derisively say "that's not what FlowLayout is for".
It damn well should have been, because adding the logic in to make it all work only takes a few hours of programming.
Enjoy. It comes with a main method in it, so you can import it, look at the code (compiled into the jar) and run it to see what it does. It does simple.
JavaDoc is here
What does it look like? Well that's hard to say, since layout managers are responsible for placing components, rather than be visible somehow, but let's imagine we have a large text, chopped up into randomly sized/coloured letters with white backgrounds, and we place them on a dark blue panel. Then we have the BetterFlowLayout manager do its magic with us only saying we want a line spacing of 5px, a paragraph spacing of 15px, and horizontally left justified lines, with the letters vertically bottom aligned (or 'baseline' aligned in the case of text) per line too.
Then we get this:
Unicode strings in java in uString
Sunday 3rd of May 2009, 07:54:12 am
I got fed up with Java's inability to properly handle unicode strings due to it relying on a 16 bit "char" primitive. Unicode (at the time of writing) basically covers a space that requires 4 bytes, and char is only 2 bytes 'wide', so it just ... doesn't work. Strings report the wrong length, substring selection can chop up unicode glyphs mid-byte-sequence, it's a mess.
So I wrote a uString object instead. It's downloadable as a convenient jarchive for use in your own projects (with the source compiled into the jar), and hopefully it will become obsolete soon enough as the java String starts using a variable length encoded character primitive (I'm thinking a 7-bit-with-has-more-bit byte, but who can say what's optimal)
The javadoc can be found here
- Pomax
A walk through the garden in photography
Saturday 18th of April 2009, 05:42:15 am
With the weather being pleasant, I decided to take a stroll through my parents' garden and take a few pictures. The result is actually fairly enjoyable so I figured I'd set up a set for it, starting at this photograph.
Need SQLite 2.8.17? in programming
Friday 10th of April 2009, 04:52:49 am
Need SQLite 2.8.17 but can't find it on sqlite.org? Then fret not, because it's still there, just not linked from the download page.
click http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-2_8_17.zip to download it, or copy-paste that link if you don't trust direct filelinks (javascript might be making it look like a safe file O_o!)
As always, scan any files you download. Wouldn't want to be one of those millions of people who are responsible for spam, trojans and virusses infecting us all, do you?
Thursday 9th of April 2009, 03:52:16 am
The browser, mind, not the artistic music and singing.
Why? Because as a developer I like to be able to write cross-browser material, and Opera doesn't let me. For instance, have some fun looking at mouse handling in js across different browsers, and notice what Opera allows.
That's right, just one mouse button. I'm sorry, was the internet use moving to online applications, with their own context menus? Well too bad, Opera won't let you use those.
It also doesn't *tell* you it blocks things in its error console.
Thanks, Opera. Thanks to your idiocy I have to figure out some kind of idiotic button bar system now. I hope you fossilise soon (or experience a rebirth as a browser willing to move along with the internet. Even IE's trying, why aren't you?)
Formatting plain text in html? in programming
Thursday 12th of March 2009, 05:55:09 am
What happens when you combine dynamic content distribution with dynamic CSS manipulation?
The simple answer is "whatever you make it do", but the more interesting answer is "the basis for a dynamically adjustable text formatting system", which lets you set up print pages in terms of page dimensions and print dimensions, and have it automatically generate the right number of pages as divs on the page.
Which is exactly what I need for evaluating my book rewrite. Paired with a bit of nifty php processing so my 漢字(ふり) notation becomes
Putting it all together's lead to this, which works in Firefox 3, Webkit (Safari 4 and Chrome 1), Opera (9.5x) and IE7. So consider me quite happy. This was actually really fun to write.
Monday 9th of March 2009, 05:04:37 am
This entry links to my article on personal freedom (elucidated via the crowd-winning technique of using sex as example) and what this actually means in terms of thinking about one's opinion in regards to various freedoms.
Read the article here